I had a hard time, today, coming up with something coherent to write. Mondays are my hardest days of the week to write, because generally, I’ve taken two days off of writing at that point and it feels like all the pathways to writing have crusted over a bit in the interim.
I started to write one thing and I couldn’t find the flow for it at all. By the time I realized it completely wasn’t working, the end of my writing time had almost approached. I wrote what follows instead. Hopefully there will be something more substantial tomorrow.
I broke my hand, once, and while it healed, I felt as though I was living someone else’s life. It’s odd, because it seems like such an insignificant thing, right? You hear about people breaking bones all the time. You know it’s inconvenient, and that it takes a lot of time to recover, but you don’t necessarily think about how different that person’s life is while they are in recovery.
I’m a person who uses his hands a lot. I mean, everyone does, right? They’re how we interact with the world. But for me, the things I do with my hands were part of my definition as a person. I’m a poet. I’m an artist. I write and draw and paint for significant portions of my day. I play the piano every day, because I like the way it sounds and the way it makes me feel. In the evening, I let myself play video games for a few hours.
Every single one of those things relies on my hands. So when my dominant hand got crushed in my card door, and it got broken so badly that I couldn’t do any of those things, I felt like a completely different person. Suddenly, I couldn’t do any of the things by which I defined myself.
It was less like I had broken my hand and more like I had broken myself, for a while. I got very down on myself. It was rough on my and on my girlfriend. I started to deeply question the way I define myself and the way I derive happiness from the world. I started to hate myself for defining who I was by my actions and by the things that made me happy.
I was in a bad place, but as even bad things tend to do if you give them the chance, that dark path actually led me to a place of light. The hobbies and actions by which I defined myself were not actually me, after all, but just the way I expressed myself upon the world. Even if I broke my whole body, and I couldn’t express myself to the world at all, I would still be me, and that’s enough.
Daydreams 